Pigeons & Planes is all about music discovery, supporting new artists, and delivering the best music curation online and IRL. We're always listening. Pigeons & Planes is all about music discovery, supporting new artists, and delivering the best music curation online and IRL. We're always listening. Pigeons & Planes is all about music discovery, supporting new artists, and delivering the best music curation online and IRL. We're always listening. Pigeons & Planes is all about music discovery, supporting new artists, and delivering the best music curation online and IRL. We're always listening. Pigeons & Planes is all about music discovery, supporting new artists, and delivering the best music curation online and IRL. We're always listening. Pigeons & Planes is all about music discovery, supporting new artists, and delivering the best music curation online and IRL. We're always listening. Pigeons & Planes is all about music discovery, supporting new artists, and delivering the best music curation online and IRL. We're always listening. Pigeons & Planes is all about music discovery, supporting new artists, and delivering the best music curation online and IRL. We're always listening.

NEWSLETTER

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what.cd, oink, nine inch nails

“I was responsible for the dancing baby meme,” Rob Sheridan laughs over a video call. Now better known as an accomplished graphic designer and the former creative director of Nine Inch Nails, Sheridan’s list of accolades date back to 1997, when he created a website dedicated to the low-resolution animated GIF.

The first thing I notice when our interview begins is his t-shirt, which bears the ironic slogan “HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC,” a phrase once printed on record sleeves in the UK during the ‘80s alongside a cassette tape resembling a skull and crossbones, later used in the logo of the infamous BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay. During his decades-long career in the music industry, Sheridan has stood out as one of the few outspoken advocates of media piracy.

“I was really early on the internet, making websites just as a hobby in high school to teach myself HTML,” he explains. “I remember the first time I was able to download the leak of a new song, Nine Inch Nails’ 1997 single ‘The Perfect Drug.’ It was played on a radio station and someone recorded it, and was able to upload it in this RealAudio format which compressed music in a way that made it manageable to download for the first time.”

While attending New York’s Pratt Institute the following year, Sheridan dove headfirst into the world of illegal file sharing. “Very much in the way that Napster originated, people had their own servers with files in public folders. You’d connect to the local network at your dorms and people had their mp3 collections on there. I ended up discovering a whole bunch of music that way. I downloaded a whole bunch of albums that I never had the opportunity to try because every album was an 18 dollar investment. That kind of radicalized me, and I became a fan of so much more music.”

While barely finished with his first year of art classes, a Nine Inch Nails fan site Sheridan had created caught the attention of the band, and in 1999 he was hired to design their official webpage.

“I ended up leaving school and moving down to New Orleans, living down at their studio and working there. One thing led to another and I became a creative partner, then art director, and doing more stuff,” he explains. “They'd all been kind of holed up in this studio for a couple years following up their huge album [The Downward Spiral], and it was all very secretive. I was the kid coming in with a bunch of energy and all this technological interest—like hey, check out this LimeWire thing. Everything we did with Nine Inch Nails was very confrontational with new technology.”

As an avid pirate suddenly finding himself in the midst of the music business, Sheridan saw the issue from a different angle than most of the suits he was surrounded by. “I got brought in and we were being flown to New York, the label was taking us out to these expensive dinners and paying for everything—top notch hotels, everyone had private cars and drivers. There was so much money going around, and it wasn't the artists who were rolling in cash. I remember one of my first comments to Trent [Reznor] was, ‘Now I see why CDs cost 18 dollars.’”

Rob Sheridan.

During our interview, Sheridan admits that he eventually invited Reznor to Oink’s Pink Palace, a private BitTorrent tracker for music which the frontman later called “the world’s greatest record store” during an interview with Vulture.

Launched in 2004, Oink’s Pink Palace was created by a 21-year-old computer...